With a team of volunteers, Vanessa Auger, research manager at Mutex, launched a production line for protective devices in full confinement. And demonstrated that innovation and solidarity could go hand in hand.
The sense of solidarity and the taste for innovation and action. Vanessa Auger had the recipe, when France began to live confined, to meet her need “not to stay at home without doing anything”. Responsible for studies at Mutex, the young woman who works in Paris and lives in Tours has managed with her friends to launch the manufacture of devices to help the actors on the front line in the Covid-19 crisis, hospitals, nursing homes , medical offices, pharmacists and nurses for whom they have made valves to adapt leisure masks to resuscitation unit respirators and protective visors. All this in record time in a country almost at a standstill… and respecting the rules of confinement to the letter!
The story began for Vanessa Auger by looking at how Italians, faced with a dramatic health situation, had used leisure masks to equip respirators in intensive care units and also to protect doctors and nurses. “With a friend, we made a prototype but it remained to manufacture specific valves to connect the masks to the respirators and we launched an appeal on social networks for the support of 3D printing specialists”, he explains. -she.
A team of volunteers
It’s not easy to embark on such an adventure when a good part of the French are confined to their homes… But the “printers” answered the call and then everything accelerated. “We obtained from the sports equipment brand which manufactures these masks that they deliver 130 to us, then the Tours hospital gave us its agreement to test the prototype”, says Vanessa Auger who, at the same time, disseminated all the process necessary to launch the manufacture of these parts on an “open source” platform.
And since two good ideas are better than one, the small team of volunteers thus formed has also developed a process for manufacturing plastic protective visors. It remained to produce these products … and nothing could be done without financial assistance. This came from Vanessa Auger’s employer, Mutex, which granted a budget of a few thousand euros to buy the raw materials and from the city of Tours, which lent premises to assemble all the elements, manufactured home by the 56 “3D printers” who had joined the operation and who were working… confined to their homes!
Future projects
“In this room, we made the assemblers, also volunteers, work in groups of two by choosing people who lived together, explains Vanessa Auger, and to deliver the equipment, we also had very specific health rules respecting distancing” . The “customers” (hospitals, medical practices, pharmacists and also medical and social centres) were approached thanks to the contacts of the structures of the VYV group.
In the end, the initiative made it possible to deliver 130 masks equipped with their valve and 10,000 visors. And above all, it should have a sequel. “We had to form an association to carry out this project and with this structure we wish to continue our achievements with objects intended for school principals to help in certain lessons”, explains, enthusiastic, Vanessa Auger who is already building the future of his “small company” of volunteers at the heart of the solidarity economy.
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